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The Morning After: Weekend After E3 Edition

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Weekend at Bernie's

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

Welcome to the weekend. The E3 2017 show floor has closed, but gaming news will continue to flow all weekend as we wrap up our coverage of the event. Of course, that's not the only thing that happened this week, so check below for a few more highlights.

Despite tons of hype, Samsung's Bixby virtual assistant launched with only some of its promised features enabled. Now, Samsung is ready for an "early preview test" of voice search and control, which Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus owners can register to join. The company has ambitious goals for Bixby, and this will be our first chance to see if it can really play in the arena with Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa.

Sure, you could worry about what wasn't in Sony's E3 presentation (The Last of Us 2), but there is another option. Just enjoy a sleek preview of what's coming to PlayStation next year, with a few 2017 releases dropped in. In just a few minutes, we'll make sure you see the best of what Sony showed, including a new Spider-Man game, another Shadow of the Colossus remake and the next God of War.

If you want to play retro Atari 2600 games, there's plenty of options, but a new console offers support for the original cartridges with all the modern day perks. The RetroN 77 plays most, if not all, of the original game cartridges in glorious 1080p, at a modern aspect ratio right out of the box.

We're at a critical moment in the development of new creative platforms. Companies like HTC, Sony, Microsoft and Google are fundamentally altering the way we experience the world through AR, VR and AI. Meanwhile artists, musicians, filmmakers and developers are pushing the boundaries of traditional storytelling, embracing those technologies to explore worlds beyond our own.

Engadget wanted to shed a light on that work, so we reached out to some of the people making that work possible and with their input created the Engadget Alternate Realities grant program. From now until June 30th, we're accepting submissions for new, existing or altered works that make creative use of new technologies to explore the theme of alternate realities. Those projects will debut at The Engadget Experience, a one-day event at the United Artists theatre in downtown LA on Nov. 16th, 2017.

According to Lawbreakers lead designer Dan Nanni, "The first thing we wound up doing was throw all the rules away." That's why this team shooter is lacking many of the tropes you've seen in games like Overwatch, Monday Night Combat and Team Fortress 2. That's why this game not only defined roles like sniper or tank, but also crouching, sight aiming and sprinting. Here, everything is about "vertikilling" across low- and zero-gravity zones of the map. Each character moves in a way that almost feels like it belongs in its own game. We only had a few minutes with the title, but it felt exciting and fresh.

Ubisoft's Skull and Bones takes the ship battles of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag and turns them into grand-scale, five-on-five multiplayer naval warfare. Mat Smith got a peek at some of the game's five-on-five multiplayer action, but he's still waiting to find out if Ubisoft can spin this feature into an entire game.

It's difficult to create new characters that players can instantly love, but Polyarc managed to do just that with Quill. She's the star of Moss, an upcoming PlayStation VR game that harkens back to classic adventure games like The Legend of Zelda and The Secret of Mana. You exist as a character in the game that Quill interacts with, while also controlling her from afar. The game is made by a team including ex-Bungie and Rockstar employees and feels like it was ripped from one of Studio Ghibli's films. Interested yet?

Amy Kneepkens, head video creator at AbleGamers, joined us onstage at E3 2017 to give us a view into accessibility issues affecting virtual reality. If it's not the gesture controllers, it might be how camera controllers are typically transplanted to the headset itself. If you can't move your head and neck easily, how are you supposed to look around your virtual world?

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